Reading:Haynes NASA Mars Rover Manual - purchased at Cheltenham Science Festival because I thought it might contain useful pictures and information. At the moment its a little heavy on the listing of components for my taste.

Listening:Verity Podcast: AVA - as recommended by magslhalliday. I've been really enjoying this Doctor Who podcast, in particular because the participants regularly disagree with each other (often vehemently) without it descending into some kind of idealogical warfare.

Watching:Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. We are almost at the end of season 1 which has got quite gripping after a slow start. I'm curious to see how they are going move the show forward after this though, since they have pretty effectively ripped up the format they established in the first two thirds of the season.

One of the good things about Agents of SHIELD is that they keep ripping up the format and changing things around. It's an evolving piece which keeps pace quite nicely with the broader MCU events in the movies (the other Netflix TV shows are more tightly focussed and only really mention the broader issues).

I had heard it got better, but I must say I was very pleasantly surprised at how this season ended. The first few episodes, which I had watched on first transmission, were distinctly bland. I'm glad I gave it a second chance.

I'd heard that it picked up later in the season, but I hadn't quite expected it to shift so dramatically from a very format heavy episodic wierd-thing-of-the-week set up into an extended more-or-less six episode story in which the individual episodes made no attempt to be self-contained. I also wasn't expecting the "traitor in their midst" character to be played so consistently unsympathetically.